Archive for October 15th, 2009

• US Airways announced yesterday the sale of 10 of its 25 99-seat Embraer E-190s to Republic Airways, which owns (among other things), Frontier Airlines and Midwest Airlines. This move does not come as a surprise.

• As we speculated might happen, other airlines are indeed objecting to Delta’s proposed transfer of its ‘daily’ JFK-Bogota flights to Atlanta. What’s interesting and a tad unexpected is the exact arguments Spirit and American in their objections are making: that the U.S. Department of Transportation was correct last year to recognize the importance of JFK-Bogota (as opposed to say US Airway’s competing CLT-BOG bid or Spirit and American’s various South Florida-BOG bids) and that some other airline besides Delta should be awarded the right to fly the route.

Nothing yet from US Airways, but they aren’t always the fastest in their DOT filings. Follow the fun here and do a search for “OST-2007-0006″.

• Bob Jordan, Executive VP of Southwest Airlines, at the Boyd Group’s Aviation Forecast Summit: “Watch for new cities being opened in 2010.” Which is significant as CLT is one of a limited number of major airports that the big discounter doesn’t currently serve.

Unclear why this is a story. Other than the fact that Democrats on the House Oversight committee want to make it one.

In fact, if anything it supplies evidence that BofA board members were surprised — shocked even — that the bank’s performance would mandate a cut in the dividend paid to shareholders. Everyone but little children knew that was coming back at the first of the year.

Turns out that some bank insiders were not conspiring to hide bad info from the shareholders but instead were simply clueless themselves. As I’ve always said, if human stupidity might be a cause of any action or inaction, it probably is the cause.